But isn't the more expressive argument saying "hey, if you want to care about bit patterns, memory allocation patterns and word alignment, you can!" rather than abstracting such things away from the "surface" of the language

In C++ world it seems to mean "yeah you can do all that crazy stuff if you want", i.e. being able to express those ideas in the language, whereas (to me) it should mean "the intent of my code can be easily expressed"

Heffalump, n-dolio, I've sent a patch that attempts fix the cannot-cancel-record-in-spite-of-text-editor and failing-text-editor-produces-empty-patch-name issues you have with the current UI: http://bugs.darcs.net/patch1088